iomart, what shower of bastards

Iomart have screwed us up royally today. The Glasgow based hosting provider who's website boasts "100% uptime guaranteed" Have screwed up.

On thursday we got an email from subsidiary easyspace saying:

As part of our ongoing improvement to our Network and Infrastructure, we are in the process of moving services between datacentres. This migration is a simple physical move between two facilities and while no action is required by you, some customers may experience website and/or email downtime. In order to minimize customer impact, the move will be carried out over a 6 hour period from midnight on Saturday 26th January 2008 until 6.00 am Sunday 27th January 2008.

6 hours, complete by 6am you note.

It went on to say:

Mail & web services with the following IP Ranges will not respond during the outage:
84.22.184.XXX
84.22.161.XXX
84.22.162.XXX

Imagine my surpise when a machine with an address in the 84.22.180.xxx range wasn't responding at noon today, 6 hours after this downtime was supposed to have ended.

(In the past two months we've also been aware that they've wiped complete DNS zones for two of our clients, claiming unpaid bills or something when nothing of the kind was true.)

Whats worse is that I've spent all day trying to get in touch with them and they aren't answering the phone, or responding to emails, or support tickets. Our account manager is out of the country and not answering his mobile. I drove the 30 miles to their head office, it was empty and shut up for the weekend.

Iomart, you bastards.

1/ I wasn't expecting this machine to be affected
2/ Two days isn't enough time to do anything about contingency even if we had expected it
3/ What the fuck is going on? I can't even get in touch with you. Our clients are loosing money.

So in summary, you useless shower of twats, forget any more business coming your way from this direction.

Anyone else reading this, I suggest you look for a reputable company, I know I will be come monday morning.

Update: Its now 8 days since the "event", and although Iomart are reading this blog, we still haven't had a satisfactory explanation.
Actually we haven't had any explanation at all. Way to do customer service guys.

Innovate or die

Told one of my guys that I needed him to be an innovator, then I looked it up in the thesarus, now I'm not so sure!

agitator, anarchist, antagonist, apostate, demagogue, deserter, dissenter, experientialist, experimenter, frondeur, guerrilla, heretic, iconoclast, independent, individualist, innovator, insurgent, insurrectionary, malcontent, mutineer, nihilist, nonconformist, opponent, overthrower, recreant, renegade, resistance, revolter, revolutionary, revolutionist, rioter, schismatic, secessionist, seditionist, separatist, subverter, traitor, turncoat, underground

Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.3.1) via http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/innovator

My Celebrity Look-alikes

Scary Snowman

Scary Snowman, originally uploaded by Emma. x.

My kids made this scary snow man while the snow lasted. It never lasts long round here.

New Chair for Apache James PMC

Its been a long holiday, and I meant to blog this much sooner, but I've been too busy hanging out with the family.
On December 19th the ASF board passed a motion to recognise the change of the Apache James PMC chair from Serge Knystautas to myself.
This is a big honour for me, and I intend to work hard in 2008 to live up to the example Serge has set.
I haven't much to say about James right now, but I'm sure I will be saying more as the months progress.